MEMO from the publisher

Four years ago last February the Chief of Time Inc.'s London News Bureau took on a special assignment. Andre Laguerre went to Cortina and from there covered the VII Olympic Winter Games for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. Three months later he joined the staff of this magazine.

As Assistant Managing Editor, Laguerre captained the seven-man team in Melbourne that reported the 1956 Olympics for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED. When the Overseas Press Club made its 18th Annual Award in the spring of 1957, I received a letter:

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S coverage of the Olympic Games in Melbourne and Cortina," it read, "has been chosen for a top Overseas Press Club award for 1956 for the magnificent and exhaustive coverage of those events. Specifically, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED was named Number One in the category for best magazine reporting of events involving persons, places or things beyond the 48 states of the United States."

This very directly is a measure, and, as I have grateful reason to know, only one measure, of the contribution which Andre Laguerre has made during the four years since he came to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.

Laguerre's education divided itself among the United States (his father was an official in the French consulate in San Francisco), England and France, as did his early journalistic experience, which included tours of duty for the San Francisco Chronicle and various British and French newspapers. A French liaison officer with the British forces during World War II, he was one of the last to be evacuated from Dunkirk. Later he was press officer for the Free French under General de Gaulle and André Malraux. When the war ended, he assumed charge of the press department of the new French government.

In 1948, two years after joining Time Inc.'s Paris bureau, he was its chief. In 1951 he became Chief of the London News Bureau and Time Inc.'s senior European correspondent.

Laguerre's attachment to sport began with boyhood and baseball in San Francisco when the Giants were New Yorkers and the Seals wore uniforms. Today his colleagues can testify that it encompasses a knowledge and perception as broad as that of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED itself—the magazine Andre Laguerre will now direct as Managing Editor.

PHOTO

ANDRE LAGUERRE